Sibling Reverie

Rock Singer Poe And Her Novelist Brother Are On A Concert Tour That Is Rewriting Some Of The Rules Of Art -- And Of Family Bonds.

July 19, 2001|By Julia Keller, Chicago Tribune

Typography

can

be

visually

arresting

and

psychologically

b a f f l i n g

That's what Mark Z. Danielewski thinks, anyway, which is why he took a perfectly good concept -- the novel, with its neatly typed pages and steady march of chapters and stately linear narrative -- and ripped it to pieces.

By the time he taped, stapled and dog-eared it together again, he had decked it out with strange typography, braided narratives, dueling footnotes, multiple fonts, pictures, poems and tickling mysteries. His House of Leaves is like nothing you've seen before.

And just to make certain he's not confused with anybody else out there in the overcrowded world of high-concept novelists, Danielewski recently embarked on a book tour that includes his sister, the rock singer Poe.

Or did Poe recently embark on a rock tour that includes her brother, the novelist Mark Danielewski?

Hard to say -- which is what makes their creative collaboration so nifty. Poe's music includes echoes of her brother's prose; Danielewski's prose is influenced by his sister's music. On "Hey Pretty/Drive By 2001 Mix," the current single from Poe's Haunted CD (Atlantic) that recently reached No. 13 on Billboard's modern rock chart, Danielewski reads from pages 88 and 89 in House of Leaves, creating what a Random House spokesman called "a first for publishing -- a popular song bringing readers to a literary novel."

Given the bizarre and daring nature of his novel, you might expect Danielewski to be a wild man in person, stamped with tattoos and snarling against authority. But the 35-year-old novelist is polite, almost courtly in his manners, and if he were wearing a blue suit instead of a blue T-shirt with a scene from The Exorcist on its front, you might mistake him for a CPA.

What you wouldn't expect, most likely, is that Poe, a year younger than her brother, was funny, friendly and utterly self-effacing, the antithesis of the rock-singer hauteur.

Once together, the two talked a blue streak about their peripatetic childhood; about their complicated relationship with their late father, avant-garde filmmaker Tad Danielewski; about their Ivy League educations (hers at Princeton, his at Yale); about music, mysteries, language, ideas and poached eggs.

While the "Hey Pretty" single is their first formal collaboration, "We've been doing this our whole lives," Danielewski said. "We've just never been in the same place at the same time for it to happen."

House of Leaves was published last year, after a decade's hard labor, he said. Hunks of it had been posted on the Internet along the way, building high expectations among fans of experimental literature.

Danielewski didn't disappoint. His eerie tale of a house that grows bigger on the inside than on the outside, supposedly chronicled in a documentary film, requires the reader's eyes to zigzag across pages spliced with footnotes and wily cryptograms embedded with separate and seemingly unrelated narratives. At some points, the reader literally has to turn the book upside down to follow the plot.

The author spent three weeks typesetting portions of the book by hand, just to make sure it was done right.

The payoff: House of Leaves, a best seller with more than 100,000 copies in print, was called "a Blair Witch Project with footnotes" by Newsweek and "funny, moving, sexy, beautifully told" by The New York Times.

And that's where things might have ended, with Danielewski repairing to his Los Angeles apartment to work on a second novel, except that he and his sister realized one day that they had been exploring similar themes: death, family, loss, reconciliation. He did it in prose fiction and she did it in music and lyrics.

So when Poe's Haunted was released last year, she and Danielewski teamed up for a tour of Borders bookstores in 22 cities. He had already completed a solo book tour, but this was different: On this one, he would read, then Poe -- backed by recorded music -- performed her songs.

"We thought it was going to be a small event," Danielewski recalled. "But we'd go to these Borders stores and there would be 150 to 700 kids. It was unbelievable."

Once the Borders tour concluded, radio stations began to play "Hey Pretty" with Danielewski's spoken-word interludes -- there are two versions on the CD, one with his words, one without (the one with is "Hey Pretty/Drive By 2001 Mix") -- and garnered great reaction from music fans. That inspired the novelist to hitch a ride on Poe's current concert tour, which concludes Aug. 14 in Los Angeles. Their love for words is evident not only in their work, but also in their conversation, which can be as complex, meandering and overlapping as the dialogue in Danielewski's novel. They argue, tell each other to shut up, then listen while the other talks; they employ each other's thoughts as links to whole new galaxies of discussion.

"We're discovering," Danielewski said, "that language is so significant. Words have been around for millions of years. They've survived. This is a cold world we live in; things don't survive without a reason. They've survived because they're necessary."